Chamath Palihapitiya has a plan to save Twitter: Make it a little
bit more like Reddit.

Palihapitiya, the principal of venture capital firm Social
Capital is one of Silicon Valley's most outspoken investors, and
he did not disappoint on stage on Wednesday at Vanity Fair's New
Establishment Summit in San Francisco.

Vanity Fair's Nick Bilton asked the panelists, who also included
Box CEO Aaron Levie and Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker, what
they'd do if they were asked today to take over Twitter for Jack
Dorsey.

Palihapitiya had a three-part plan:

Reduce the cost basis, which he said "makes no
sense" and limits the company's ability to innovate.
Palihapitiya said Twitter spends about one-third as much money
as Facebook does on operating the service, even though it has
about one-sixth as many users (about 300 million per month to
Facebook's approximately 1.7 billion), and limits the length of
posts to 140 characters. When Levie suggested it was crazy that
Twitter hadn't been able to address its problems with trolling
and abuse of users, Palihapitiya said, "The product is
technically broken."

Figure out the product vision. Palihapitiya
said that Twitter shows there's a demand for something between
Facebook and Reddit, where some content in the news feed is
chosen algorithmically (like Facebook), but you can dive deeper
into particular subjects if you want to (like Reddit). He
thinks Twitter needs to do a better job enabling the deep-dive
part. "It's impossible to engage deeply in the product," he
said. "I'd change that."

Restore morale. "That is a broken culture
now," Palihapitiya said. "People who are there now are probably
really sad." He pointed out that Twitter was able to create a
product that hundreds of millions of people use every month,
and he says there are still good people there. "Liberate them
from whatever they're dealing with now."

Meeker said it's easy to talk about turnarounds but hard to
execute them, suggesting that it would take at least 100 days for
anybody new to come in and fix what ails the company.